Partition Mount Names

rushi · 07-17-2006, 09:09 AM

I have several partitions on my machine and they all have names like /dev/sda1 sda2,hda1,uba1,ubb1. Mounted on this machine are several partition to harddrives, external USB drives and USB keys.

I wanted to know how these names are given and if there is any rule to this naming scheme.

edit: Also all these partitions are different filesystems.

david_ross · 07-17-2006, 01:46 PM

Welcome to LQ.

hd=Hard Disk
sd=SCSI Disk

Usb drives use the scsi subsystem so they also show as scsi devices. The following letter is the physical drive number so the first to be recognised by the system would be a, the second b and so on. The number on the end of that is the partition number.

For example the primary master hard drive partition 1 would be hda1 and the second partition on the secondary slave drive would be hdd2.

michaelk · 07-17-2006, 01:54 PM

SATA and Firewire also use the SCSI subsystem.

rushi · 07-18-2006, 08:31 AM

Thanks, its clear now!